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Modern Moral Philosophy
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
16 pages, Unknown Binding
Published January 1, 1958
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About the author
G.E.M. Anscombe
58 books120 followersGertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, better known as Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. A student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she became an authority on his work, and edited and translated many books drawn from his writings, above all his Philosophical Investigations. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and ethics. Her 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy" introduced the term "consequentialism" into the language of analytic philosophy; this and subsequent articles had a seminal influence on contemporary virtue ethics. Her monograph Intention is generally recognized as her greatest and most influential work, and the continuing philosophical interest in the concepts of intention, action and practical reasoning can be said to have taken its main impetus from this work.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 3, 2017
Elizabeth Anscombe's revolutionary 1957 paper "Modern Moral Philosophy" truly deserves the kind of praise that it has gotten in the philosophy community- in terms of reviving an entire branch of normative ethical theory that had previously been abandoned.
Anscombe's paper claims that both the "consequentialism" (a now-popular philosophy term invented by Miss Anscombe) of people like Bentham and Mill as well as the deontology of Immanuel Kant or W.D. Ross has completely jettisoned all the tools in which to do good moral philosophy. This is because both of them still speak in terms of "ought", but lack the sufficient ground to explain why we should think in terms of "ought". Kant relies on a view of the self as its own legislator, but how can the self properly legislate when it can hardly form universal maxims that it can keep? Bentham and Mill rely on pleasure. But pleasure is an awfully superficial psychological concept, even when it is given advanced formulations in the best utilitarian thinkers. The fact of the matter is is that "ought" belonged to a time period when "ought" rested on a presupposition that there was some source from which "oughts" would make sense. An age of divine law, as embodied within Judaism, Christianity, or Stoicism.
This crisis of modern moral philosophy is given even more expression when we consider the challenge to such branches of what Anscombe calls "law-based ethics", the challenge put forth by David Hume. Hume challenged Judeo-Christian and Classical thought by posing the "Is-Ought" Problem. The blunt, bare facts of what "is" do not at all imply there are "oughts". However, Hume's view collapses on itself, for in this dogmatic assertion that an Is can never be an Ought, Hume must acknowledge that he will have to smuggle in some "Is" in order to get to his hypothetical oughts. But in order to do that, Hume will have to admit that some blunt facts simply can apply to value judgments, which would cause him to commit the same error that he believed all rationalist, law-based (whether divine or natural) ethics committed. Either that or he could descend into complete moral nihilism.
From both these facts, that the Is-Ought Dogma of Hume and the "Ought" based ethics of utilitarianism and Kantianism both fail, moral philosophy must do one of two things: it must return to a day in which "ought" statements made sense or it must abandon the concept of "ought" entirely. It seems in fact that Anscombe supports something of a compromise between the two: we must begin focusing more on the "Is" of the human condition, applying practical ethics to what we can apprehend to be sources of human flourishing. Anscombe supports therefore "a sound philosophy of psychology". By studying the Is by means of practical reason and by employing concepts that moral philosophy had previously jettisoned, such as "action", "intention", "pleasure", etc. we can learn to do moral philosophy in such a way that makes coherent sense. By studying the elements of the human person, we can through a glass darkly understand the "Ought" that law-based ethics imposes on us through a series of virtues that form absolute commands by which to act by.
The project that Anscombe's paper set off has renewed virtue ethics as a discipline of ethical theory, rivaling both consequentialism and deontology. It is a staunch reminder of the bankruptness of any arbitrary system of ethics that attempts to rely on such oblique perceptions as pleasure or intuition or self-legislation that modern moral philosophers in their infinite wisdom have tried to propose, but at the same time a highly original call for a renewal of interest in basic psychological and cognitive issues that themselves can translate into a comprehension of the intelligible reasons we are who we are. What philosophy is about in the first place!
Anscombe's paper claims that both the "consequentialism" (a now-popular philosophy term invented by Miss Anscombe) of people like Bentham and Mill as well as the deontology of Immanuel Kant or W.D. Ross has completely jettisoned all the tools in which to do good moral philosophy. This is because both of them still speak in terms of "ought", but lack the sufficient ground to explain why we should think in terms of "ought". Kant relies on a view of the self as its own legislator, but how can the self properly legislate when it can hardly form universal maxims that it can keep? Bentham and Mill rely on pleasure. But pleasure is an awfully superficial psychological concept, even when it is given advanced formulations in the best utilitarian thinkers. The fact of the matter is is that "ought" belonged to a time period when "ought" rested on a presupposition that there was some source from which "oughts" would make sense. An age of divine law, as embodied within Judaism, Christianity, or Stoicism.
This crisis of modern moral philosophy is given even more expression when we consider the challenge to such branches of what Anscombe calls "law-based ethics", the challenge put forth by David Hume. Hume challenged Judeo-Christian and Classical thought by posing the "Is-Ought" Problem. The blunt, bare facts of what "is" do not at all imply there are "oughts". However, Hume's view collapses on itself, for in this dogmatic assertion that an Is can never be an Ought, Hume must acknowledge that he will have to smuggle in some "Is" in order to get to his hypothetical oughts. But in order to do that, Hume will have to admit that some blunt facts simply can apply to value judgments, which would cause him to commit the same error that he believed all rationalist, law-based (whether divine or natural) ethics committed. Either that or he could descend into complete moral nihilism.
From both these facts, that the Is-Ought Dogma of Hume and the "Ought" based ethics of utilitarianism and Kantianism both fail, moral philosophy must do one of two things: it must return to a day in which "ought" statements made sense or it must abandon the concept of "ought" entirely. It seems in fact that Anscombe supports something of a compromise between the two: we must begin focusing more on the "Is" of the human condition, applying practical ethics to what we can apprehend to be sources of human flourishing. Anscombe supports therefore "a sound philosophy of psychology". By studying the Is by means of practical reason and by employing concepts that moral philosophy had previously jettisoned, such as "action", "intention", "pleasure", etc. we can learn to do moral philosophy in such a way that makes coherent sense. By studying the elements of the human person, we can through a glass darkly understand the "Ought" that law-based ethics imposes on us through a series of virtues that form absolute commands by which to act by.
The project that Anscombe's paper set off has renewed virtue ethics as a discipline of ethical theory, rivaling both consequentialism and deontology. It is a staunch reminder of the bankruptness of any arbitrary system of ethics that attempts to rely on such oblique perceptions as pleasure or intuition or self-legislation that modern moral philosophers in their infinite wisdom have tried to propose, but at the same time a highly original call for a renewal of interest in basic psychological and cognitive issues that themselves can translate into a comprehension of the intelligible reasons we are who we are. What philosophy is about in the first place!
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March 7, 2024she really ate those philosophy bros up, huh
March 19, 2020
MMP is G.E.M. Anscombe's greatest philosophical achievement not just because of the phenomenal critique of all her predecessors who wrote on moral philosophy but also because it is perhaps the single most important essay published on ethics since WWII. Anscombe is usually characterized as a moral absolutist - some things are intrinsically wrong and ought not be done, whatever may be the consequences.
She argues three things in MMP: 1) moral philosophy is not profitable until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology (in which we lack), 2) "morally" right or wrong ought to be jettisoned because they are inadequate derivative of thicker conception of ethic (like ‘untruthful’, ‘unchaste’, ‘unjust’ from Aristotle's account), and 3) differences between the English writers on Moral Philosophy from Sidgwick to present times are of little importance as their overriding concern is "consequences" in determining moral quality of an action.
Anscombe unlike all other moral philosophers has maintained a frustrating brevity in her paper and the details of her critique of Joseph Butler, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill is like a procession of comments that only a reader who is already acquainted with the various philosophers will know. Otherwise, you'll have to go back and read them in order to understand a few terse paragraphs in a single page of Anscombe, like me.
She argues three things in MMP: 1) moral philosophy is not profitable until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology (in which we lack), 2) "morally" right or wrong ought to be jettisoned because they are inadequate derivative of thicker conception of ethic (like ‘untruthful’, ‘unchaste’, ‘unjust’ from Aristotle's account), and 3) differences between the English writers on Moral Philosophy from Sidgwick to present times are of little importance as their overriding concern is "consequences" in determining moral quality of an action.
Anscombe unlike all other moral philosophers has maintained a frustrating brevity in her paper and the details of her critique of Joseph Butler, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill is like a procession of comments that only a reader who is already acquainted with the various philosophers will know. Otherwise, you'll have to go back and read them in order to understand a few terse paragraphs in a single page of Anscombe, like me.
January 15, 2025
I first heard of the name Lizzie Anscombe in a podcast regarding a famous response she made to Hume on causality.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2btn...
Don’t rmb what exactly she argued and I cba to replay the episode, but it concerned a thought experiment that Hume proposed, that if you see a rabbit appear in your backyard, must you necessarily assume that the rabbit had a cause (Must the rabbit come from somewhere? Are there carrots in your backyard that the rabbit was attracted to?) This infinite regress of causes ultimately makes us ponder the first cause of the universe.
Then I saw that she was a disciple and influential interpreter of Wittgenstein, which made me more interested in her work.
This paper by Anscombe reminded me what reading philosophy is supposed to feel like, cuz most of the time I felt like I was reading utter gibberish, given the cryptic nature of her work.
But the good news is, Anscombe clearly states the 3 theses she wants to make, right in the 1st paragraph. These 3 theses are intriguing, and, taken as a whole, shocking for the time, and they serve as a useful reference throughout the paper:
1) Anscombe thinks that we cannot do moral philosophy until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology,
2) Concepts of moral obligation, moral duty, moral rights and wrongs, and the MORAL sense of ‘ought’ more generally ought to be (haha! Ironic) thrown out,
3) English moral philosophers since Henry Sidgwick to Anscombe’s day have made negligible progress (a more historical and contextual implication, which modern readers will probably rightfully regard with little importance)
These 3 clear theses of Anscombe managed to allow me to glean some very high-level insights:
It was helpful to find out that among Anscombe’s unusually broad philosophical interests, she was very concerned with the philosophy of action. What can we know from a set of observations of (human) action? What does it mean to act? Must action stem from intention? Given a natural world operating via a system of natural laws, does intention even play a role in action? This is especially difficult to ascertain since we cannot get inside any minds other than our own, so while we observe the world as social scientists, we cannot separate action from intention. And this is made even MORE difficult given that intention hides deep within the many layers of the subconscious mind – many times, we don’t even know our OWN intentions.
And so one strand of argument that links thru this paper is Anscombe’s struggle to reason about the underlying intention governing morality as we know it. I think smtg that Anscombe was trying to say is that it is meaningless to judge the morality of a person, even given a complete set of observations of his ACTIONS, if at the end of the day we cannot know his INTENTIONS (behind those actions). This idea, taken to its simplest degree, clearly has many timeless legal and social implications – in the court of law, judges are always trying to determine criminal intent.
(Lizzie Anscombe famously condemned Harry Truman’s bombing of Hiroshima.)
Now, Anscombe’s wrestle with the philosophy of action (although she never explicitly mentions it in the paper) subtly links to her modern moral philosophy that she’s proposing, her philosophy of language, and the philosophy of psychology that she argues should be the right way we should do moral philosophy.
She starts by discussing many giants of moral philosophy – Aristotle, Butler, Kant, Bentham and Mill, Hume – and tears them down. (To that, I have no comment, considering that Anscombe is way more well-studied in philosophy than I am.) Notably, she calls Hume a ‘sophist’. No comment as well.
But to illustrate her point, she takes Aristotle’s famous system of virtue ethics, where an ethical action is that which a wise, virtuous person would do, given the circumstances. I THINK Anscombe is illustrating that Aristotle modelled virtue on a practical yet still intellectual solution as to how we should act in certain situations, but the course of moral thinking has transformed those intellectual solutions into normative morals.
The key is that Anscombe tells us that we don’t have a CLEAR UNDERSTANDING of what ‘virtue’ even means. It’s a failure of our language to adequately reach universal consensus on several cornerstones of morality, namely, ‘action’, ‘intention’, ‘pleasure’, ‘wanting’ etc. And thus we should bridge that language gap first before we even try to do moral philosophy. This is why we should first have a solid philosophy of psychology – what is the underlying psychology of action? What is the psychology of intent?
As Anscombe powerfully states, ‘It can be seen that philosophically there is a huge gap, at present unfillable as far as we are concerned, which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human “flourishing”.’
To me, what (I think) Anscombe is saying here, is consistent with my own thinking, that most of moral philosophy can be thought of a subset of the philosophy of vagueness. The perennial problem of vagueness – if a man loses his hair one by one, at what point does he become bald? If a 100cm person is undeniably short, and a 200cm person is undeniably tall, and if we could line up a row of people whose heights increased by 1 cm, where is the cutoff point of tallness?
There’s a lot of grey area in things. Most things that lie in-between, are ‘vague’.
So, to relate this with morality, let’s assume for the sake of discussion, that aborting a fetus immediately after it is conceived in the womb is moral, and let’s say aborting it when it is already 6 months old is immoral. I think many people can safely agree on that, at least for the purposes of discussion. So where is the cutoff point where aborting becomes immoral? It’s clear that many moral disputes stem from vagueness.
So I think moral philosophy should be done in tandem with the philosophy of vagueness. And I THINK this is how modern moral philosophers approach it too.
https://vaguenessandethics.wixsite.co...
As Anscombe remarks, ‘It is a necessary feature of consequentialism that it is a shallow philosophy. For there are always borderline cases in ethics.’ I certainly agree, and I do think the fact that there will always be ‘borderline cases’, that make most moral philosophies seem ‘shallow’.
P.S.
1) Anscombe has other interesting ideas regarding morality. She says that since we must dispense with moral ‘oughts’, it’s still possible to return to ordinary ‘oughts’. This clearly is an interesting thought experiment. In a hypothetical world without mind-independent morals, what would it mean to ‘OUGHT’ to do smtg?
2) All this discussion about our moral sentiments, and the classic Humean bridge from what IS to what OUGHT, obviously has rich implications for economists. For example, I got obsessed with this problem after seeing this paper https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c... by Dan Klein et al (altho he’s likely another crackpot from GMU). Basically, this Dan Klein dude made me realize that normative prescriptions cannot be distinguished from well-formulated positive statements. For example, the statement ‘this regulation will improve net societal welfare’ is basically the same as ‘this regulation is GOOD’. Very fuzzy bridge, perhaps?
3) The philosophy of action has implications for markets. We can only ever access the DATA (i.e., sadly, ex post returns). Can we ever access the underlying TRUTH, or, the INTENTIONS of market participants? Never. We can only ever formulate theories to approximate market behaviour.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2btn...
Don’t rmb what exactly she argued and I cba to replay the episode, but it concerned a thought experiment that Hume proposed, that if you see a rabbit appear in your backyard, must you necessarily assume that the rabbit had a cause (Must the rabbit come from somewhere? Are there carrots in your backyard that the rabbit was attracted to?) This infinite regress of causes ultimately makes us ponder the first cause of the universe.
Then I saw that she was a disciple and influential interpreter of Wittgenstein, which made me more interested in her work.
This paper by Anscombe reminded me what reading philosophy is supposed to feel like, cuz most of the time I felt like I was reading utter gibberish, given the cryptic nature of her work.
But the good news is, Anscombe clearly states the 3 theses she wants to make, right in the 1st paragraph. These 3 theses are intriguing, and, taken as a whole, shocking for the time, and they serve as a useful reference throughout the paper:
1) Anscombe thinks that we cannot do moral philosophy until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology,
2) Concepts of moral obligation, moral duty, moral rights and wrongs, and the MORAL sense of ‘ought’ more generally ought to be (haha! Ironic) thrown out,
3) English moral philosophers since Henry Sidgwick to Anscombe’s day have made negligible progress (a more historical and contextual implication, which modern readers will probably rightfully regard with little importance)
These 3 clear theses of Anscombe managed to allow me to glean some very high-level insights:
It was helpful to find out that among Anscombe’s unusually broad philosophical interests, she was very concerned with the philosophy of action. What can we know from a set of observations of (human) action? What does it mean to act? Must action stem from intention? Given a natural world operating via a system of natural laws, does intention even play a role in action? This is especially difficult to ascertain since we cannot get inside any minds other than our own, so while we observe the world as social scientists, we cannot separate action from intention. And this is made even MORE difficult given that intention hides deep within the many layers of the subconscious mind – many times, we don’t even know our OWN intentions.
And so one strand of argument that links thru this paper is Anscombe’s struggle to reason about the underlying intention governing morality as we know it. I think smtg that Anscombe was trying to say is that it is meaningless to judge the morality of a person, even given a complete set of observations of his ACTIONS, if at the end of the day we cannot know his INTENTIONS (behind those actions). This idea, taken to its simplest degree, clearly has many timeless legal and social implications – in the court of law, judges are always trying to determine criminal intent.
(Lizzie Anscombe famously condemned Harry Truman’s bombing of Hiroshima.)
Now, Anscombe’s wrestle with the philosophy of action (although she never explicitly mentions it in the paper) subtly links to her modern moral philosophy that she’s proposing, her philosophy of language, and the philosophy of psychology that she argues should be the right way we should do moral philosophy.
She starts by discussing many giants of moral philosophy – Aristotle, Butler, Kant, Bentham and Mill, Hume – and tears them down. (To that, I have no comment, considering that Anscombe is way more well-studied in philosophy than I am.) Notably, she calls Hume a ‘sophist’. No comment as well.
But to illustrate her point, she takes Aristotle’s famous system of virtue ethics, where an ethical action is that which a wise, virtuous person would do, given the circumstances. I THINK Anscombe is illustrating that Aristotle modelled virtue on a practical yet still intellectual solution as to how we should act in certain situations, but the course of moral thinking has transformed those intellectual solutions into normative morals.
The key is that Anscombe tells us that we don’t have a CLEAR UNDERSTANDING of what ‘virtue’ even means. It’s a failure of our language to adequately reach universal consensus on several cornerstones of morality, namely, ‘action’, ‘intention’, ‘pleasure’, ‘wanting’ etc. And thus we should bridge that language gap first before we even try to do moral philosophy. This is why we should first have a solid philosophy of psychology – what is the underlying psychology of action? What is the psychology of intent?
As Anscombe powerfully states, ‘It can be seen that philosophically there is a huge gap, at present unfillable as far as we are concerned, which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human “flourishing”.’
To me, what (I think) Anscombe is saying here, is consistent with my own thinking, that most of moral philosophy can be thought of a subset of the philosophy of vagueness. The perennial problem of vagueness – if a man loses his hair one by one, at what point does he become bald? If a 100cm person is undeniably short, and a 200cm person is undeniably tall, and if we could line up a row of people whose heights increased by 1 cm, where is the cutoff point of tallness?
There’s a lot of grey area in things. Most things that lie in-between, are ‘vague’.
So, to relate this with morality, let’s assume for the sake of discussion, that aborting a fetus immediately after it is conceived in the womb is moral, and let’s say aborting it when it is already 6 months old is immoral. I think many people can safely agree on that, at least for the purposes of discussion. So where is the cutoff point where aborting becomes immoral? It’s clear that many moral disputes stem from vagueness.
So I think moral philosophy should be done in tandem with the philosophy of vagueness. And I THINK this is how modern moral philosophers approach it too.
https://vaguenessandethics.wixsite.co...
As Anscombe remarks, ‘It is a necessary feature of consequentialism that it is a shallow philosophy. For there are always borderline cases in ethics.’ I certainly agree, and I do think the fact that there will always be ‘borderline cases’, that make most moral philosophies seem ‘shallow’.
P.S.
1) Anscombe has other interesting ideas regarding morality. She says that since we must dispense with moral ‘oughts’, it’s still possible to return to ordinary ‘oughts’. This clearly is an interesting thought experiment. In a hypothetical world without mind-independent morals, what would it mean to ‘OUGHT’ to do smtg?
2) All this discussion about our moral sentiments, and the classic Humean bridge from what IS to what OUGHT, obviously has rich implications for economists. For example, I got obsessed with this problem after seeing this paper https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c... by Dan Klein et al (altho he’s likely another crackpot from GMU). Basically, this Dan Klein dude made me realize that normative prescriptions cannot be distinguished from well-formulated positive statements. For example, the statement ‘this regulation will improve net societal welfare’ is basically the same as ‘this regulation is GOOD’. Very fuzzy bridge, perhaps?
3) The philosophy of action has implications for markets. We can only ever access the DATA (i.e., sadly, ex post returns). Can we ever access the underlying TRUTH, or, the INTENTIONS of market participants? Never. We can only ever formulate theories to approximate market behaviour.
September 14, 2025
This may not be so much a review. I was advised to read this before engaging After Virtue. Given it's only 19 pages, it seemed like a good deal. Buyer beware, it's dense. Don't let the 19 pages fool you. It felt like 60 – OK, 57.
In a nutshell, she eviscerates 'modern moral philosophy', hence the title. She does a great job tearing it down. She gets⭐⭐⭐ because of (1) the aforementioned density and (2) the replacement she suggests, which, spoiler alert, is in line with Alasdair MacIntyre.
There are plenty of other reviews and resources to summarise this essay so that I won't do it here.
In a nutshell, she eviscerates 'modern moral philosophy', hence the title. She does a great job tearing it down. She gets⭐⭐⭐ because of (1) the aforementioned density and (2) the replacement she suggests, which, spoiler alert, is in line with Alasdair MacIntyre.
There are plenty of other reviews and resources to summarise this essay so that I won't do it here.
March 29, 2023
This 20-page paper was a real “pipe bomb” as far as moral philosophy went — shredding the field since the days of David Hume to Anscombe’s present — and laying the practical grounds for a reconstruction of the field done with varying degrees of success (mostly less rather than more) in books like After Virtue. If you’ve ever wanted to read a great example of how to eviscerate an adversary’s entire oeuvre in a few pointed sentences, here you go.
September 24, 2025
I don’t really understand the appeal of the entire academic field of moral philosophy. That is not to say I don’t find anything interesting in moral philosophy--what I find less interesting are overwritten academic texts that overcomplicate truly interesting and compelling moral conversations.
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April 22, 2018I'm under-read in meta-ethics, and my approach (I'm a Christian who is interested in virtue ethics but also has an eye on consequences--e.g., an absolute prohibition against lying is unappealing to me) might strike Anscombe as, as she calls an argument of Moore's, "stupid." It remains a pleasure to read such an influential and clear article. I intend to return to it soon.
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